Mark Edel-Hunt delivers a poignant performance as Alan Turing in Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code. Credit: Manuel Harlan.
Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code returns in a new production at Northampton’s Royal & Derngate, directed by Artistic Director Jesse Jones, as part of the theatre’s Made in Northampton season. Based on Andrew Hodges’s Alan Turing: The Enigma, the play has always balanced triumph with tragedy, charting the extraordinary life of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant minds. This revival, however, gains fresh resonance through Neil Bartlett’s newly written epilogue, which reflects on Turing’s royal pardon in 2013 and the subsequent passing of Turing’s Law.
Mark Edel-Hunt leads the cast as Alan Turing, his performance a careful balance of intellectual intensity and human fragility. Around him, the ensemble bring clarity and depth: Niall Costigan, Joseph Edwards, Peter Hamilton Dyer, Carla Harrison-Hodge, Susie Trayling, and Joe Usher all inhabiting roles that sketch the personal and professional worlds that shaped — and, ultimately, destroyed — Turing.
Jones’s direction keeps the staging taut, with Jonathan Fensom’s design evoking both the functional austerity of Bletchley Park and the claustrophobic constraints of postwar Britain. Johanna Town’s lighting and Robin Colyer’s sound design lend the production a spare beauty, while Gerrard Martin’s movement direction adds a subtle physical language to the piece. The creative team, supported by Hannah Miller’s casting and Gemma Boaden’s voice and dialect coaching, ensure that this is a revival steeped in detail and purpose.
What emerges is theatre that feels both urgent and haunting. The courtroom and police interview scenes still chill the blood, but the new epilogue lifts the play beyond history into the present moment — asking us to reflect not only on what was lost when Turing’s life was cut short, but also on how much of today’s technological world rests on foundations he laid. Watching in 2025, with artificial intelligence reshaping daily life, the metaphor feels inescapable: we are standing on the tip of the iceberg Turing foresaw, the vastness of its future still hidden beneath the surface.
This Breaking the Code is as poignant as it is powerful — a portrait of a man who loved, lost, and never stopped questioning. A co-production between Royal & Derngate, Landmark Theatres and Oxford Playhouse, in association with Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse and HOME, it runs in Northampton until 27 September before touring. It is, in every sense, exceptional theatre.
